Step Right Up, Guess The Number Of Cores Correctly And You Get $35 Off Your Bulldozer

Source: The Register Step Right Up, Guess The Number Of Cores Correctly And You Get $35 Off Your Bulldozer

The Core Of The Case Against AMD From Four Years Ago … Or Was It Eight?

If you bought a Bulldozer chip from AMD, you might have been part of a class action suit which was settled yesterday to the tune of $12.1 million, or $35 per customer.  The case stemmed from a disagreement on how AMD advertised their core counts on the Bulldozer, who described the four dual core modules as being eight cores in total.  This of course goes against the way we describe core counts now and for the past several years … somehow.

There was a leg for the claimants to stand upon in court, which proved sturdy enough for their arguments to win the day in court.  While it has become tradition to count total cores and not modules, it was not enshrined back then and some customers expected each core to have a separate floating point unit instead of the two cores attached to the module sharing resources. 

It will be interesting to see how many collect on the $35, as well as if the funds last after the lawyers take their share.  After all, it’s not like AMD can offer free credit monitoring in lieu of money if the pool dries up.

In AMD’s mind, four modules times two CPU cores equals eight CPU cores. But to the angry consumers, who launched a class action lawsuit back in 2015, they are not real “cores” because they share resources, including frontend circuitry and – crucially in this case – a single floating point unit (FPU).

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About The Author

Jeremy Hellstrom

Call it K7M.com, AMDMB.com, or PC Perspective, Jeremy has been hanging out and then working with the gang here for years. Apart from the front page you might find him on the BOINC Forums or possibly the Fraggin' Frogs if he has the time.

1 Comment

  1. collie

    2 things.

    1: I got my bulldozer as a freebie from Warsam back in the day, am I eligible? lol.

    2nd: There never was any confusion, not like when Nvidia did that not all ram is equal but it’s all ram thing, they were VERY clear about how the shared floating point worked, you guys talked about it constantly, we discussed it on the forms and during podcast-chat, it was not a deception in any way.

    Reply

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